Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.

Kamikaze and the Nakajima Ki 115 Tsurugi

Kamikaze, the Divine Wind,
named in honour of the fortuitous typhoons that had wrecked Kublai Khan’s
Mongol fleets in 1274 and 1281 and saved Japan from its first foreign
invasions.

This small
rocket powered aircraft was used by the Japanese navy at the end of WWII
as a desperate means of attacking allied capital ships.

After
release from the mother aircraft (a Mitsubishi G4M2e "Betty" bomber) the
rocket motor would ignite to give the vehicle a range of about 20 miles.

The kamikazi
pilot would then guide the plane, its nose laden with high explosive, onto
the target.

The weapon had only
limited success. Because American Navy fighters patrolled further than 20
miles away from any capital ship, the unwieldy mother ship/rocket plane
combination proved a sitting duck for the American pilots.

Over 5,000 Kamikaze died
in WW2

As the Japanese military
became increasingly desperate to find ways of slowing the Allied advance,
naval officer Ensign Mitsuo Ohta conceived a specialized suicide attack
aircraft that would be inexpensive, easy to manufacture in large numbers,
and equipped for high speed to avoid being shot down.

Once the concept had been
accepted, Yokosuka began developing the MXY7 Ohka (cherry blossom), a
small, rocket-powered vehicle mounting a large warhead in the nose and
intended to be carried to the target area by a Mitsubishi G4M2e "Betty"
bomber. After being released, the Ohka would engage its rocket motors to
make a high-speed dash to the target ship. Flight testing began in late
1944, but production of the Navy Suicide Attacker Ohka Model 11 began even
before these tests were complete.

By March 1945, 755 of the
Model 11 had been built, but initial deployments proved rather
unsuccessful. Although difficult to shoot down because of its high speed,
the Ohka was a sitting duck when still attached to the large, slow mother
plane. In addition, the design proved to be very difficult to manoeuvre
making it nearly impossible to hit even a slow moving target. In an
attempt to improve the odds, a new version, the Model 22, began
production.

This model featured
reduced wingspan and a smaller warhead allowing the Ohka to be carried by
the much faster Yokosuka P1Y1 Ginga medium bomber. The Model 22 was also
fitted with a Campini-type jet engine instead of rockets increasing the
Ohka's range as well as reducing speed to allow better manoeuvrability.
However, the jet engine was found to be vastly underpowered resulting in
later versions powered by a turbojet, but none of these reached production
before the end of the war.

Japan also studied other
methods for launching the Ohka, including a land based version and one
carried by submarines. Although some 850 Ohkas were built, including
trainer versions equipped with landing skids, only 50 ever saw combat
sinking only three enemy ships.

There were two basic types
of "special attack" groups. Kamikazes were line pilots who used their own
aircraft, commonly fighters, to crash into enemy shipping. Thunder Gods
were specially trained pilots who used the Ohka, the manned Japanese
equivalent to the German V-1. Once the Ohka's vulnerability became
apparent, some Thunder Gods switched to flying fighter-bombers overloaded
with standard ordinance. The resulting unit was called the Kemmu Squadron,
although it remained closely associated with the Ohka operations.

"One-third of the men on
the ship were lost," retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Robert H. Spiro Jr.
recalled of one attack. "So, it was personally devastating. It was
heartrending. At the same end, for a few hours we saw blood. The ship was
on fire. We thought the bow was going to break off."

The similarities don't end
with the images and emotions. Looking back at Japan's infamous kamikaze,
they seem more related to the pilots of al Qaeda than most Japanese today
would like to admit.

They were fanatically
devoted to their emperor, who was considered a god at the time. They were
motivated by self-righteous anger against the West.

"Many Japanese do believe
that they fought a just war," said Gregory Clark, president of Tama
University in Japan. "[They believe] that they were fighting under extreme
odds. And that anything was justified in the attempt to win this war, in
which they were clearly the weaker power. And that included using
kamikaze."

‘No
Other Way to Fight Back’

More than 5,000 kamikaze
died before the end of the war, and 20,000 were still awaiting missions.
But a handful who did take off on suicide missions are still alive today.

"We had no other way to
fight back," said Kenichiro Onuki, a volunteer who crash-landed before
reaching his target. "This was the only way to prevent the U.S. military
from advancing into our homeland." Another survivor, Kensuke Kunuki, said
through a translator: "I had no fear. I wanted to sacrifice my life."

Kunuki suffered terrible
burns when his plane was forced down by mechanical problems. He said his
first thought at the time was that he wanted to try again because he
hadn't killed any Americans.

‘They Were Not Fanatics’

In a new book on the
kamikaze, Hideaki Kase, an outspoken Japanese nationalist, said there was
no truth to the wartime propaganda that portrayed the kamikaze as a
fanatical cult. He says they were no different than American youths who
gave their lives in desperate military campaigns.

"They were not fanatics,"
Kase said. "They were not brainwashed. They were ordinary, young kids."
Even today, he says, the West has difficulty grasping the notion that
suicide is a noble act in some cultures. "Suicide can be honourable,
positive, if that act was committed for the family or for the community or
for the motherland," Kase said, adding that "patriotism — yes, patriotism"
drove the kamikaze pilots.

Years Later, Heroic Depictions

Patriots? Immediately
after the war, a demoralized Japan saw the kamikaze as symbols of military
madness. The very word "kamikaze" became a synonym for crazy, reckless
behaviour.

Yet few Japanese could
ignore the fact that the kamikaze spirit was deeply ingrained in the
Japanese psyche — duty, loyalty, sacrifice for the good of the group. Half
a century later, the kamikaze are no longer viewed in such black-and-white
terms.

Rare colour images of the
suicide attacks from American archives are now included on popular videos
in Japan. They are among a flood of retrospective books, documentaries and
commercial films that portray the kamikaze more heroically.

Most of the kamikaze took
off on their one-way missions from bases on Japan's southernmost island of
Kyushu, and the largest base was in the town of Chiran.

Today, Chiran has become a
testament to Japan's renewed fascination with the suicide pilots. It's now
home to the country's largest kamikaze museum, which attracts nearly 1
million visitors a year. Many are moved to tears by the haunting faces of
the boys about to die and the emotional poems and farewell letters they
wrote.

"At the moment of death,"
a visitor remarked, "they must have been calling out for their mothers."

The museum has become a
favourite of Japanese nationalists, who want Japan to stop apologizing for
the war and to build a strong military again. For them, the kamikaze
embodied Japan's samurai warrior spirit and should be idolized.

‘They Could Not Back Down’

That's exactly what
Akihisa Torihama hopes will never happen. He is the grandson of Tore
Torihama, a woman once called the kamikaze's "mama-san." She ran a small
restaurant in Chiran where many of the pilots had their last meals and
confided all the things they could not say in their heavily censored
letters home.

"My grandmother told me
the boys knew the war was lost, knew their lives were being thrown away by
their commanders," he said through a translator. "They flew their missions
because the social pressures on them were so great, they could not back
down."

Today, he has transformed
the old restaurant into an alternative kamikaze museum, to keep alive the
message passed on by his grandmother — that the suicide pilots were not
heroes, but the victims of fanaticism. And what's the verdict of the
surviving kamikaze? Kuniki says he has no regrets. "My nation and my
family were in danger," he said. "History will judge if we were right or
wrong."

But Onuki said it was
wrong to waste so many young lives. "Yes, we volunteered, but we were
ordered to volunteer," he said. "It could have taken real courage to
disobey that order."

‘Not
a Single Civilian’

The surviving kamikaze,
like most Japanese, bristle at suggestions that the kamikaze were the same
as the al Qaeda suicide pilots. "They killed only military personnel,"
Kase said. "Not a single civilian." That distinction is not lost on Spiro,
who as an American sailor who faced the kamikaze in combat. "At least it
was a military tactic and they were not attacking our wives, children,
friends, mothers," Spiro said.

Still, there's no question
that recent events have cast Japan's suicide pilots and their motivations
in a very new light.

The Pacific war was a new
kind of war. The scale was astounding and the distances involved immense.
Both sides struck at their enemies thousands of miles from their home
bases. Projection of power was the key concept here and in the American
island-hoppng campaigns of 1943,44 and 45 it achieved a level both in
concept and execution that can only be called epic. There were no titanic
clashes of armies as experienced in Russia, France or even the Western
Desert. Sea power was the instrument of victory and that sea power was
centred on the aircraft-carriers that gave every task force its most
potent weapon of either offence or defence. The carrier-borne planes swept
the skies of enemy aerial resistance, the seas of enemy ships and allowed
the fleet to take the soldiers and marines anywhere they wanted.

The ships couldn’t,
however, take or hold a piece of land. The very idea of warships alone
being able to cow recalcitrant natives into submission had died
spectacularly with the failure of the Royal Navy at the Dardanelles and
the Japanese were no ‘lesser race but a highly developed people with a
potent war machine. When the fleets had done their job it was still up to
the footsloggers to go ashore and and take the land. In the Pacific war
this was a particularly bloody affair.

All generals order their
soldiers to fight until the last man and all armies expect their men to do
this. Only the Japanese, in the modern era, have ever done this with any
consistency. Folly, insanity, fanaticism one might say but no less a trial
for the men trying to destroy such resistance. On atolls now remembered
only by the men who fought on them the drama was played out a hundred
times. Despite the pounding of naval guns and carrier planes, every yard
had to be cleared with rifle, grenade and flamethrowers. Like most
soldiers the Japanese knew that the deeper you burrow the better your
chances, and they were veritable moles.

The most costly and
terrible of these actions took place in 1945 on the island of Okinawa. To
get their troops onto the beaches the US navy assembled a fleet of 1500
vessels. They carried over 550,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.
They provide landing decks for hundreds of planes and they operated in
hostile waters 6,000 miles from the continental United States. It was a
floating city replete with repair shops, hospitals, kitchens, laundries,
arsenals of millions of rounds of ammunition and tens of thousands of
shells, living quarters, chapels, combat control centres, radar rooms and
of course the teeth in the shape of massive guns and fast modern aircraft.

It took the Americans 83
days to secure the island and in that time the fleet stayed loyally
offshore in the face of the fiercest attacks the US navy has ever had to
suffer. The attackers were known as the Kamikaze, the Divine Wind, in
honour of the fortuitous typhoons that had wrecked Kublai Khan’s Mongol
fleets in 1274 and 1281 and saved Japan from its first foreign invasions.
The official name was the Tokubetsu Kogeki Tai ,or Special Attack Group.
The pilots were mostly young men, often very very young. They were given a
rudimentary training and flew old antiquated planes that had no chance in
any kind of air-to-air combat.

There were, however,
thousands of them and they possessed a singular determination. It’s not
they wanted to die rather that they felt they had to die if their country
was to have any prospect of survival. Once they had taken off there was no
way they could return honourably and alone in their cockpits in the last
moments of their lives they had only two possible finales; to die having
failed or to die having succeeded. There is no young man who would choose
the latter. They were almost always picked up on radar for , novice pilots
that so many of them were, wave-hopping was a dangerous course. Combat air
patrols flying the highly effective Hellcat fighter piloted by experienced
naval aviators would strike them down in great numbers but still they came
on. Some would penetrate the fighter screen and then would begin that
intense battle between shipboard gunners who wanted to live and airmen who
wished to die.

The horror the sailors
felt in the face of such suicidal rushes was compounded by the almost
continuous nature of the attacks. One British correspondent noted that
every Kamikaze seemed to be targeted exclusively on yourself. (The smaller
British fleet near Formosa drew off only a few of the attackers from the
main action at Okinawa and suffered much less than the Americans. One
reason for this was the armoured decks of the British carriers.)

Militarily these attacks
were foolishness on a grand scale and reflected the bankruptcy of the
Japanese high command in the final days of the war. The results were
paltry. Although eight carriers hit and some seriously damaged not one was
sunk. The smaller ships of the radar pickets and anti-aircraft screens
suffered badly and in total more than 300 kamikazes succeeded in crashing
onto a ship. Only 30 of these ships were lost, another 288 damaged. To
achieve this the Japanese squandered more than 3,500 planes. Vice-Admiral
Takijiro Onishi, the man who had pushed hardest for Kamikaze attacks to be
undertaken, committed seppuku (the ritual suicide in which cuts open ones
own belly) when Japan surrendered. His whole strategy had been based on
the impossibility of Japan ever giving up and in the 18 agonising hours it
took him to die perhaps he felt remorse for the men he had needlessly sent
to their deaths.

Nakajima Ki 115 Tsurugi

Good 3/4 front perspective view of a standard Ki-115a, probably taken
shortly after the war.

The Japanese Army in
early 1945 anticipated that the multitude of obsolescent combat
aircraft and trainers it was collecting for suicide attacks (“taiatari”)
would be insufficient to stop an invasion of the Home Islands.
Accordingly, on January 20, 1945, the Army Air Staff instructed the
Nakajima company to design and build a purpose-made suicide attack
plane. It was to be easy to manufacture, maintain, and operate, and was
to be capable of carrying a single bomb of up to 1,764 lbs. The
undercarriage was to be jettisonable and reusable. It was to be powered
by virtually any air-cooled radial engine with a power rating of from
800 to 1,200 horsepower. Specified maximum speed was to be 211 mph with
the undercarriage in place, and 320 mph once it had been jettisoned.

Designated the Ki-115a Special Attacker Tsurugi (Sabre), the new
aircraft was designed by Aori Kunihiro, with personnel of the Mitaka
Research Institute and Ota Manufacturing Company assisting him in its
design. It was intended to be built by semi-skilled labour, so the
Tsurugi was quite simple – perhaps too simple. The fabric-covered tail
surfaces had an inner structure of wood, the fuselage was of steel
structure with a tin engine cowling and thin steel panels on the
forward and centre sections, and the all-metal wings were of
stressed-skin construction. A variety of surplus aero-engines could be
used, fastened to the fuselage using four bolts, but the 105 examples
actually built were all powered by the Nakajima [Ha-35] 23 (Ha-25)
fourteen-cylinder radial, the Army version of the Navy’s Sakae engine.
The pilot sat quite far back behind the engine, above the wing trailing
edge. The sole armament, as stated above, was to be a single bomb of up
to 1,764 lb., attached to a recessed crutch under the fuselage centre
section. The undercarriage, as noted, was non-retractable, being
jettisoned shortly after take-off for a suicide mission.

This shot from the rear quarter displays the sleek lines of the Ki-115,
marred by the clunky-looking undercarriage.

Flight tests commenced
as soon as the first prototype, manufactured by Mitaka, was ready in
March 1945. And although the Tsurugi was easy to build, its actual
performance during ground tests was quite poor. The undercarriage was
unbelievably crude, lacking as it did shock absorbers, and the pilot’s
field of vision for taxiing was maddeningly inadequate. In the air, the
aircraft was hard even for an experienced test pilot to handle, so a
great many modifications were required before turning green pilots
loose with it. In June 1945, a redesigned undercarriage with proper
shock absorbers was fitted and auxiliary flaps were attached to the
wing trailing edges. Nevertheless, there were a number of fatal
accidents involving the Ki-115 even after the modifications were made
(indeed, one could say it caused the “premature suicide” of a number of
its unfortunate would-be pilots!). Provision was made on all of the 104
production examples for two solid-fuel rockets under each wing to add
boost to the Ki-115’s final dive, but none of these aircraft were ever
used in combat.

The Japanese Navy expressed an interest in the Ki-115, and so two
examples were delivered to the Showa Airplane Co. Ltd., makers of the
L2D transport. They were to be used as prototypes for the Toka
(Wisteria) Suicide Attacker, the Navy’s version of the Tsurugi, which
was to be powered by various kinds of reconditioned surplus engines.

A Ki-115 shortly after the war, with its propeller removed to prevent
unauthorized flight.

The Ki-115b was a
projected variant with wooden wings of increased area fitted with
proper flaps, and with the cockpit moved forward to improve the pilot’s
vision. None were completed, however, and the Ki-230, a further
development, was fated never to leave the drawing board due to the
war’s end.

As a final word, it should be pointed out that, aside from the idea of
suicide attacks itself (which Westerners would find disturbing), such a
plane as the Ki-115 was tactically very limited. For example, what if a
formation of Tsurugis was sent to attack an Allied fleet, and they
couldn’t find it where reconnaissance reports had said it would be?
Since they lacked landing gear, the Ki-115s would have to waste
valuable time and fuel searching, perhaps in vain, for targets, and if
they ran out of fuel, they’d have no choice but to land in the sea –
and because Japan had virtually no air-sea rescue system, the pilots’
lives would be lost meaninglessly. And knowing that the Ki-115 lacked
on-board guns, its pilots would be wholly dependent on the escort
fighters to fight for them and force a way through Allied interceptors
– and what if the interceptors overwhelmed the escorts? In the end, the
Ki-115 must remain a footnote, an oddity, in combat aircraft design.

A line-up of propeller-less Ki-115s in a roofless hangar.

Nakajima Ki-115 Tsurugi
Technical Data

Type:
Single-seat, single-engined suicide attack plane, of mixed construction
as per the text.